Oliver Wirkus

Gavin has been building software on the Office platform since 2003 and SharePoint solutions since 2007. Gavin is a regular speaker at User Groups throughout New Zealand and loves the opportunity to talk tech. He works with a great team at Intergen to deliver solutions on Office 365 and SharePoint on premises in many flavours and variations.

Perhaps you've been hearing this DevOps buzzword and wondering "What the heck is that", maybe the boss wants you to "do DevOps". Maybe you just need to be able to do more with less in your day to day. Come listen to Gavin share some of his insights from running long term customer engagements and let him share some of the tools his team uses in their projects.

Sag Baruss is an enterprise architect with over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and operating enterprise solutions built around the Microsoft stack of technologies. He specializes in data security and compliance, information management, enterprise infrastructure design, business continuity planning, and cloud-based collaboration.

In the past, Sag has led in-house IT departments, worked as a consultant, and run his own computer sales and services company. He is currently employed as a Senior Strategic Advisor with AvePoint’s Client Services Team providing solution design, program management, and enterprise architecture services. He also provides IT strategy advisement services to executives within AvePoint's top accounts.

The introduction of Office 365 Groups has created waves in recent months. As the adoption of Groups begins to grow and the offering matures, numerous individuals have begun to ask: “How do I manage groups?” “Are groups different from Teams?” “Is Yammer obsolete?” Excitement about new features comes mixed with concerns on how to incorporate Groups, combining Groups with existing business workloads and the other functionality of Office 365.

This is a 100-200 level session focusing on everything you need to know to get started with Groups and how to avoid the top pitfalls in the early stages of adoption.

Data Platform MVPAspiring Product Manager, with more than 11 years of process analysis, building solutions, customization, developing, managing and training experience, mainly focused in SharePoint. I have worked as a senior consultant, across industries with multicultural clients in different countries. VanSpug board member, currently working as a BI Analyst and maintain my O365 demos and private consulting.

Introduction - What is Product Management in most of the organizations? Business Need - Where is the pain? What is not connected? Where is the data overflow?Process Flow - How can we do it in SharePoint and other O365 tools? Demo IT Product Management life-cycle and SharePoint

You had it all right with solutions and add-ins. Your release pipeline was set up. Do new technologies and methodologies mean starting over?Don’t panic I’m here to help! Together we’ll see how to set up a devops pipeline for SPFX developments with:- Automated builds- Automated deployments- Automated tests- Code quality checksThere will be a lot of demonstrations during this session and we’ll be mostly using Visual Studio Team Services/Team Foundation Server.This session is mostly meant for develops, architects, quality assurance people…

David humbly considers himself a SharePoint JoAT (Jack of All Trades). He is the SharePoint Services Lead at Solvera Solutions, an Office Servers and Services MVP. Over the last 16 years David has worked in a wide variety of areas in IT ranging from Desktop\Server support to developing in C++ and .NET technologies. Over that period, David has been able to add value to a wide variety of clients in several sectors, including utilities, government, banking and agriculture. For the past six years David has been working exclusively in the SharePoint domain. He has helped stand up multiple Enterprise SharePoint environments as well as designed and built numerous SharePoint solutions. David recently worked with a client to implement a SharePoint 2013 environment that integrated with OpenText Content Server. David’s extensive experience in SharePoint is complemented by a range of SharePoint training courses and Certification in Microsoft SharePoint 2010. He is a knowledgeable and sought-after international speaker within IT circles and consulted regularly by companies formulating their SharePoint strategies.

Throw away your mouse. After taking part in this presentation you won't need it anymore. Well you will still need it a bit. For all that SharePoint is a massively powerful tool, everyone that works within it admits there is a lot of clicking needed to get things done. In this session we will discuss the things many of us do every day that really could done a lot easier and more efficiently with PowerShell. Administration tasks, site creation, list configuration are all things that we often do with the index finger of our hand on that mouse button. I will show you how easy it is to step away from that and use scripts to assist you in being much more efficient and the envy of all your colleagues!

So you have this shiny new SharePoint environment built inside your enterprise. You have added tons of content and have lots of users adding, modifying and deleting content all the time. You've got your system purring like a kitten and everyone loves it except for one minor detail. Your users can't find any of the content they are looking for. Search is just not working for them. If they don't know exactly where to find a file they need to reference or work on, they are spending their precious time looking for it. Join us in this session where we will discuss the concepts that SharePoint Search is built on, why it likely isn't working for you and what you can do to improve you ability to find the needle in your haystack - your content.

Co-Presenter(s)

Kanwal Khipple is the CEO and Co-Founder of 2toLead, a one of a kind consulting services firm. Kanwal is a thought leader within the SharePoint industry, experienced in building engaging and award winning solutions; most recently awarded Nielsen Norman award for the Top 10 Intranets for 2014 & 2015. He continues to push for innovation and disruption in tackling business problems by leveraging the right blend of design and technology. Kanwal has been recognized as a SharePoint Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft for the past five years (2009 to 2014) and most recently as an Office 365 MVP (2015-2016).

Imagine a future where silo'd departments and legacy processes don’t stand in our way. Today’s collaboration needs go from complex collaboration portals to simple innovation hubs and most importantly need to work for our devices. Designing portals to enable a new kind of collaboration and communication is an absolute necessity today.For the past couple years, I’ve had the opportunity to study how successful teams collaborate and have helped to transform the way teams work and collaborate together. In this session, I'll share what I’ve learned about making effective cross-discipline collaboration possible, and leave you with actionable approaches you can use to unite your team's communication and collaboration needs.

Joanne Klein (MVP)

SharePoint/O365 Consultant | NexNovus

Joanne is a SharePoint and Office 365 Consultant who attributes her professional success to sharing her technical expertise and real-world SharePoint and O365 experience with organizations of all sizes. She’s spent the past decade working with SharePoint versions 2007 thru 2013 as well as SharePoint Online in O365. Her specialties include O365 adoption, SharePoint information architecture and management, search and solution design which allows her to help organizations get the most out of their SharePoint/O365 investments. Joanne is a newly appointed Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services. She is on the leadership team for the Saskatchewan SharePoint/O365 User Group and is an avid supporter of the Microsoft technical communities at large.

So you have this shiny new SharePoint environment built inside your enterprise. You have added tons of content and have lots of users adding, modifying and deleting content all the time. You've got your system purring like a kitten and everyone loves it except for one minor detail. Your users can't find any of the content they are looking for. Search is just not working for them. If they don't know exactly where to find a file they need to reference or work on, they are spending their precious time looking for it. Join us in this session where we will discuss the concepts that SharePoint Search is built on, why it likely isn't working for you and what you can do to improve you ability to find the needle in your haystack - your content.

Co-Presenter(s)

Learn to Fly. Although one of my favourite Foo Fighters songs, its also a sentiment I really like when talking about end-user adoption. O365 is being rolled out worldwide to organizations of all sizes. Although each is unique and has different needs, they all have one thing in common: the need for end-user adoption. One of the key aspects of O365 is collaboration and the numerous services that are deployed to support it. Ironically, although many of the features are built with ease of use in mind, if you’ve ever watched a first-time user of O365 you’ll soon realize it’s not always intuitive for end-users to know how it all works together. To realize the benefits of O365, we need to ensure it is fully adopted across the organization and second-nature in users’ day-to-day collaborative work processes. Although you can take the “wing it/organic” approach, you may not get the results you are hoping for. What are some strategies and tactics you can use to stack the odds in your favour for a high degree of adoption in your organization? I’ll share my 3-step strategy and some specific tactics for each so your end-users can fly with O365!

Over 12 years of experience as a SharePoint evangelist, Riyaz strategizes and implements solutions that enable organizations to realize the full potential of their SharePoint implementation. Riyaz envisions and enables automation of business processes using SharePoint, Flow and PowerApps. At Colligo, Riyaz contributes towards its product vision and roadmap. Before joining Colligo, Riyaz was an Enterprise Strategist with Knowledgetech Consulting where he assisted multiple high profile companies strategize, architect and implement innovative solutions to maximize their investment in SharePoint and O365. Prior to that, Riyaz served as Director of Professional Services at Metalogix. Riyaz is a Microsoft Certified Professional and UBC Program Management graduate with a Bachelor in Commerce and Advanced Diploma in Software Engineering.

Mobile device use is here, and today’s enterprise must be agile enough to respond to rapidly evolving employee, client, industry and regulatory demands. In this new digital workplace, mobility plays a crucial role in enabling a highly productive workforce. The millennial workforce is mobile across geographies, time zones and devices. Mobile information governance involves securely enabling the right content to be available to the right people at the right time. Attend this session to learn how to distribute enterprise content in a controlled way – to both empower mobile collaboration, while governing mobile activity and content.

Seb is an Office Development MVP, a Microsoft Certified Software Developer and works at Valo Intranet, the product that will make you fall in love with your intranet. He is a Product Evangelist & Partner Manager for North America and is helping his partners & customers reaching their business and technology goals by ensuring that quality and simplicity are always the focus in Valo Intranet deployments around the world. Seb is speaking regularly at conferences around the world like SharePoint Saturdays, European SharePoint Conference and European Collaboration Summit. Even though he loves travelling, he loves his local community where he is an organizer of the Quebec SharePoint User Group, an organizer of MSDEVMTL and an organizer of 2 SharePoint Saturdays (Quebec & Montreal). You can read Seb's blog at www.sebastienlevert.com and you can follow his tweets at @sebastienlevert.

Things are moving fast. Sometimes you might even feel that you own comfort zone is getting of control. But in a Mobile-First, Cloud-First world, things are changing to a crazy pace and to stay on the top of your game, you need keep up with the latest and greatest technologies that are available out there. By staying up to date, you will give to yourself new options that will let you be more productive, write better code and push you in a more open and more collaborative world.

With the official shipment of Angular 2 and the current preview release of the SharePoint Framework, it is now the time to start moving towards those new technologies in your SharePoint Solutions.

In this session, we will cover the modern tool belt of the SharePoint developer by covering the SharePoint Framework as the new surface to express yourself, Angular as a Framework to enable you to build complete applications within your SharePoint modern experiences and Azure Function as the perfect server-side companion for all your Office 365 & Azure development.

This very demo-intensive session will make sure that at the end you get those 3 key takeaways :

- Understand the role of the SharePoint Framework, Angular and Azure Functions in this Cloud-First, Mobile-First world- Have a complete sample where the modern tool belt is relevant and useful in a real-world scenario- Change the way you will think for your next SharePoint project

Alec McCauley has an extensive background in graphic design, web development, systems management, and Office 365 / SharePoint development and administration. Prior to joining itgroove, Alec’s role was as Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a large independent High School in Calgary, Alberta.

His background in delivering large scale projects is a testament to his strong leadership and project management skills, delivering solutions that meet clients’ needs.

Alec’s focus at itgroove is overseeing projects and client work, ensuring that we bring our very best to everything we do. He specializes in designing, developing and implementing custom solutions with the Microsoft suite of Enterprise Products.

In his spare time Alec enjoys exploring beautiful Victoria and surrounding area with his wife Christina and dog Buster.

Gone are the days of creating MasterPages to transform SharePoint Sites with beautiful branding. In this session we'll explore Microsoft's best practices of using client side development to manipulate your site. Go beyond basic colours and logos and look at how we can ensure SharePoint reflects the organizations brand and stands out with a glossy look that will satisfy any Communications team.

Eric Overfield is a Microsoft MVP, a Microsoft Regional Director and a leading expert in SharePoint Development and User Interface design. Mr. Overfield, President and co-founder of PixelMill, has over 18 years experience with web design best practices and techniques, and over 12 years experience with SharePoint branding. Besides his in-depth knowledge of SharePoint’s branding capabilities, his expertise includes general SharePoint technology, design and architecture along with custom coded web parts, solutions, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3. He is a co-author of Pro SharePoint 2013 Branding and Responsive Web Development (Apress 2013) and Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint (EUSP Press 2013). An engaged speaker and organizer of SharePoint events as well as an active blogger (ericoverfield.com), he discusses all things SharePoint Branding and UI Design @ericoverfield.

When Microsoft released the Office UI Fabric, they enabled SharePoint developers to quickly build custom webparts, controls and applications that could inherit the innate look and feel of Office 365 and SharePoint with simple to use structured code. With Office UI Fabric React, we can quickly build sophisticated controls, tightly bound to SharePoint, such as command bars, color pickers, people pickers, panels, buttons and much more all tied in with React, the default rendering engine for the SharePoint Framework.

In this session we will introduce the Office UI Fabric and learn how to use include it in our current or next SharePoint projects. After a quick introduction of the basics and how to get started, we will dig into code samples so as to see we can build our own applications that look to be a part of SharePoint.

Benefits of this Session:

• Overview of Office UI Fabric• Learn how to use Office UI Fabric with React to leverage repeatable components and controls.• See how you can begin using Office UI Fabric React now

Yaroslav has been involved in SharePoint solution architecture and implementation since 2003 as well as a Microsoft MVP since 2009. Yaroslav frequently presents at local and worldwide tech events as well as online. He has also published several books on SharePoint including, his latest best seller: Rapid SharePoint 2013 development; as well as: Top 60 custom solutions built on SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010 branding in practice, Microsoft SharePoint and PowerShell Expert Cookbook. Be sure to check out his blog www.sharemuch.com/blog to see what's he's up to.

Many of us are familiar with this part "Build me an intranet"Many hope that everyone will love it, but how do you make sure? This session will focus on tools and techniques to effectively engage your stakeholders in prototyping of your own brilliant intranet

Michal Pisarek, Founder of Dynamic Owl Consulting is a 5 time Microsoft SharePoint MVP, an award that is given to experts in the Microsoft SharePoint community for sharing their passion, technical expertise and real-world knowledge. His passion is in ensuring that SharePoint is seen primarily as a business platform so that organizations can take full advantage of the many capabilities that it offers. Acknowledged as a thought leader in the SharePoint and Intranet space, he is a frequent speaker at many international events and has been referenced in publications and presentations by organizations such as Gartner and StepTwo's Best Practices for SharePoint Intranets report.

Join Perry Underdown, Manager of SharePoint and Web Tools at Expedia and Michal Pisarek, Director of Product at Bonzai Intranet, to learn why chose Bonzai for their SharePoint Intranet. Utilizing SharePoint 2016 and Bonzai Intranet, the travel-tech giant quickly deployed their new intranet across multiple continents to unite the organization and over 17 of its subsidiaries.

In this engaging and interactive session, you will learn about the challenges Expedia faced in this massive undertaking. Specifically, Perry and Michal will focus in on the learnings that made the project a major success including governance, change management, and strategic execution. They will also uncover the technology and methods they used to cut costs and decrease the project's time-to-delivery.

This session is a must for anyone who wants to successfully deploy an Intranet on SharePoint or Office 365 or understand how to better leverage the platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.

Zeshan has been with Softlanding since 2007. In his role as Business Analysis Lead Zeshan focuses on envisioning, planning and delivering Enterprise Content Management solutions. He brings a strong development background to the planning process, enabling him to advise clients about out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities vs. customization as requirements are being gathered. Alongside planning and envisioning, Zeshan specializes in facilitating Information Architecture redesigns, and introducing Governance for SharePoint enterprises.

How often have you heard "I can't find anything in our organization" or “Can you send me X, I can’t find it” echo within your IMs and meetings? Chances are you are hearing this loud and clear from organizations of all sizes and structures. Planning content management in the new age digital workplace can seem like a daunting task – but it isn’t. In this session, I will lead you through a real life project with a global resource organization where I helped them plan a global content management strategy, by consolidating their content sprawl and aligning this strategy with the tools available with Office 365.

Ryan Schouten has been working with SharePoint since December of 2006. He has had experience with all versions of SharePoint from 2003 to 2013. Ryan is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and has several certifications from Microsoft from SharePoint 2010-2013 and Office 365. Before starting on SharePoint development Ryan was an experienced ASP.Net developer specializing in server and client side interactions. This experience made transitioning to SharePoint a lot easier.

Ryan has worked with ZAACT based out of Salt Lake City, Utah for almost 5 years. Ryan loves being a developer and a speaker. Combining these two joys allows Ryan to do what he loves and sharing it with others. He loves working with SharePoint and spending time with his kids, not necessarily in that order. Ryan also loves the SharePoint Community and connecting with people.

In this session we will dive into the information that you will need to be a successful developer for SharePoint. Whether you are a seasoned .Net developer or a Web developer of any sort we will cover the basics of SharePoint Development and all the options available to you. By the end of this session you will have a firm understanding of how to get started developing on SharePoint and you will be, a SharePoint Padawan.

Jared Shockley is a 21 year veteran of the IT field working with both small business to large enterprise companies. As of January 2014, he rejoined Microsoft IT in Service Engineering building and improving on-prem SharePoint services as a Senior Service Engineer and later added the role of Service Owner. Prior to this return, his diverse career included delivering IT operations and solutions to mid-size healthcare organization, data center operations, business and systems consulting, web development, and enterprise-focused IT operations management. His areas of knowledge and experience center around web and data systems primarily with IIS, ASP.Net, SharePoint, and SQL Server. Lately, he has been adding Azure cloud services to his repertoire. Along with his role with Service Engineering, he regularly speaks with Microsoft internal employees and customers on the subject of SharePoint Best Practices through the IT Showcase team.

As we move to the cloud with Azure and Office 365, the world of SharePoint development has changed. No longer are developers using server-side or Sandbox solutions on the servers. Instead, they are building cloud apps that either run on other providers like Azure or AWS or the apps run on the client-side, in your browser. However, with new systems like Flow, Power Apps, and Logic Apps within Azure, many systems that people relied on developers to create are now being built by power users. We will actually go through some simple apps and workflows in Power Apps, Flow and Azure Logic Apps.

Facing a SharePoint migration or upgrade and don't know where to start? Dive in and grab the project by its horns with this session. Understand what the options for upgrades or migrations are and how those options will impact their sites and users. Learn the possible upgrade paths and the capabilities of the newer versions compared to your current environment. Focus is then moved to the technical how-to of performing either upgrades to self-hosted farms or migrations to Office 365. Learn the technical steps, highlight the "gotchas", and guide you through some of the best practices used by Microsoft IT.

Scott Stauffer (@SQLSocialite) is very PASSionate about data and enjoys meeting with like-minded data geeks. He started the Vancouver PASS Chapter in 2004. In 2008, Scott was recognized by Microsoft with a SQL Server MVP award. In 2009, Scott started a PASS BI Chapter in Vancouver, and was also at one time the PASS Regional Chapter Mentor for Canada. For over 10 years he has been an independent consultant working with clients to solve their data woes and extract insight from their business data.

You've heard about Power BI, and you've seen it, but you haven't yet rolled up your sleeves and got your hands dirty. It looks like it is really easy, but sometimes it helps to have someone step you through it the first time to help you hit the ground running. We will grab various public data sources, join them together in a model and build an interactive pièce de ré·sis·tance on the visual design surface!

Building business applications is never easy. There are always conflicting priorities between IT and business and most apps don’t merit the time and cost of traditional software development. PowerApps is an enterprise application platform for delivering line-of-business apps without writing code. It fundamentally transforms and accelerates how organizations provide employees seamless access to business apps and information. PowerApps now features built-in support for the common data model, enhanced connectivity, support for more devices and integrations with other Microsoft business offerings. Learn how you can leverage PowerApps today and a sneak peek at what’s coming next.

I am very passionate about technology and have focused on Microsoft technology stack. I took my years of real-world development experience in Australia and transitioned into a Product Marketing role in 2010. Prior to joining Hyperfish, my roles at Microsoft focused solely on the developer audience targeting the growth of the monthly active usage of both the Office and Azure developer services. As VP of Product Technology, I head up the evangelism at Hyperfish, while supporting and enabling customers and partners alike in their success with Hyperfish the service. I am a very seasoned public speaker and enjoy evangelizing technology to big and small groups of people!

Jason Warren assists customers with the design, implementation, maintenance, documentation, and troubleshooting of their new and existing infrastructure environments. Jason has strong analytical skills, which enable him to understand complex systems and effectively diagnose issues. He is a fierce advocate of automating the deployment and configuration of SharePoint farms using its built-in tools and PowerShell.

Rhia is a Solutions Delivery Specialist at Dynamic Owl and a Virtual Technical Evangelist for Nintex. Passionate about her work, Rhia designs time and money saving solutions that leverage Microsoft SharePoint, and the Nintex Suite.

Oliver Wirkus is a Microsoft MVP for Office 365 Servers and Services and Senior Consultant at 2toLead. An experienced SharePoint expert and software architect, Oliver has consulted for a variety of different industries and specializes in consulting for international projects. A long-standing SharePoint enthusiast, Oliver is a published, international speaker, former moderator of SPUG Stuttgart, and has been voted one of the Top 25 SharePoint Community Influencers in recent years.

Many enterprises which are using SharePoint as their corporate intranet have spent a lot of effort in creating custom business applications to support their internal workflows. Many of those custom business applications were created using Server-side code. As long as SharePoint 'on-premises' is used, those custom business applications work fine, but more and more enterprises are thinking about moving to the cloud, and when checking their options, they realize that Server-side code can not be used in Office365 anymore.This session provides a detailed overview on the options enterprises have when moving their custom business applications to the cloud and it also provides guidance on choosing the right option.

With Office Graph, Microsoft is providing the next evolution of corporate search. Like SharePoint Search you can use the API that Microsoft leverages to retrieve information from the Office Graph database to use with custom applications. But OfficeGraph is not working as common search engines available today. OfficeGraph relies on weighted relations and keywords created by artificial intelligence.

This sessions explains the basic concepts OfficeGraph is using to create search results and most of all it shows how to code against the Office Graph, how to create search queries by code and how to evaluate the search results by code.